Flashback faves: The Reindeer Rant

You can thank CBC Ottawa Morning for reminding me to post the annual reindeer rant today. There’s no way in a year that I’ve started mining my own content for repeats that I would forget to post my favourite seasonal repeat! And props to CBC for getting it right and saying DONDER instead of Donner. : )
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Did you think might get through one Christmas season without the annual Donder reindeer rant? Sorry to disappoint you. As long as I have pixels to purvey my message, the reindeer rant will play out at some time in the month of December.

New around here? Darling, this one is for you!

“You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen;Comet and Cupid and DONDER and Blitzen…”

As you might know, my last name is Donders. As such, it has been my lifelong quest to set the record straight and right the wrongs entrenched by Johnny Marks and Gene Autry.

Here’s a little history lesson for you. The poem “A Visit From St Nicholas”, commonly known as “The Night Before Christmas”, was written back in 1823 and is generally attributed to American poet Clement Clarke Moore (although there have been recent arguments that the poem was in fact written by his contemporary Henry Livingston Jr.) The original poem reads, in part:

More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name.“Now Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen!On, Comet! on, Cupid! on Dunder and Blixem!

In the original publication of “A Visit from St. Nicholas” in 1823 in the Troy Sentinel, “Dunder and Blixem” are listed as the last two reindeer. These are very close to the Dutch words for thunder and lightning, “Donder and Bliksem”. Blixem is an alternative spelling for Bliksem, but Dunder is not an alternative spelling for Donder. It is likely that the word “Dunder” was a misprint. Blitzen’s true name, then, might actually have been “Bliksem”.

In 1994, the Washington Post delved into the matter by sending a reporter to the Library of Congress to reference the source material. (In past years, I’d been able to link to a Geocities site with the full text, but sadly, Geocities is no more.)

We were successful. In fact, Library of Congress reference librarian David Kresh described Donner/Donder as “a fairly open-and-shut case.” As we marshaled the evidence near Alcove 7 in the Library’s Main Reading Room a few days ago, it quickly became clear that Clement Clarke Moore, author of “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” wanted to call him (or her?) “Donder.” Never mind that editors didn’t always cooperate. […] Further confirmation came quickly. In “The Annotated Night Before Christmas,” which discusses the poem in an elegantly illustrated modern presentation, editor Martin Gardner notes that the “Troy Sentinel” used “Dunder”, but dismisses this as a typo. Gardner cites the 1844 spelling as definitive, but also found that Moore wrote “Donder” in a longhand rendering of the poem penned the year before he died: “That pretty well sews it up,” concluded Kresh.

So there you have it. This Christmas season, make sure you give proper credit to Santa’s seventh reindeer. On DONDER and Blitzen. It’s a matter of family pride.

Okay, time to ‘fess up. Have I convinced you yet? Or do I have to roll this one out again next year too?

Related posts (automatically generated):

Flashback fave: The Reindeer RantMy old friend Nick, who has endured this rant more times than I can count, was asking for this on Facebook last week, so you can blame him for the recycling yet again of this hoary old favourite seasonal post of mine. Did you think might get through one Christmas...

Christmas traditions FTW: The reindeer rantI have lost track of the number of times I’ve recycled this post, but it somehow just doesn’t feel like Christmas until I’ve shared it again. Besides, with a new job and a new circle of friends, there’s a whole new audience to edumacate about this most important Christmas factoid....

The annual reindeer rant – New and Improved! With Visual Aids!Seriously? You thought you might get through one Christmas season without the annual Donder reindeer rant? Sorry to disappoint you. As long as I have pixels to purvey my message, the reindeer rant will play out at some time in the month of December. New around here? Darling, this one...

Reindeer Rant Redux – and a reindeer rampage!My bloggy peeps, I have a reindeer-palooza of fun for you today! You might have read the reindeer rant a time or two (or coughninecough) before, but now we have reindeer trivia! And photoshop! And webcams! And even reindeer on a rampage! Oh my. But first, the rant. Because especially...

Photo of the day: My Name is DonderThis might be one of my favourite Christmas photos of the boys ever. My friend Henry on Flickr gave this one an alternate title that I also really like: we’re going to need a bigger wagon! Fun, right? The expression on the reindeer slays me. That’s a Donder face if...

Photo of the Day

Click the photo to view it on Flickr, or for more information about custom family portrait photography,please visit my Mothership Photography site.

Welcome and thanks for stopping by!

Hi, I’m Danielle Donders, but my friends call me Dani, and the Internet calls me DaniGirl. I'm a Canadian photographer, blogger, government social media strategist and mom to three boys. Everything else you need to know - and a whole lot more! - is in the blog.

My least favourite of the Anne books so far. I could feel the boys' attention wandering as odd and quirky characters wandered in and out of the narrative. Any book with Anne Shirley in it is a wonderful story by default, though.